books – Page 9 – Composite

Half a shelf of Perl books

August 27, 2012 Liz

The new version of Intermediate Perl is in the Noisebridge library nestled up against all the other blue animal books.

Intermediate Perl is a new and expanded version of Perl Objects, References, and Modules. Its new chapters are: Using Modules, Intermediate foundations of Perl, Filehandle references, Regular expression references, and Creating your own Perl distribution. There are expanded and up to date lessons on testing and test harnesses for Perl as well as an introduction to Moose. This book, after you’ve gone through Learning Perl, should give a really good foundation for writing in object-oriented Perl.

I don’t write regularly in Perl for work any more, but went through some of the book’s chapters and exercises. They were easy to follow and well-written. Moose looks especially useful and cool.

Thanks to O’Reilly for the review copy and the nice addition to round out our languages library at Noisebridge!

We now have two copies of Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, two versions of Programming Perl, Mastering Perl, Mastering Regular Expressions, Mastering Perl/TK, and the Perl Cookbook. We also have Wicked Cool Perl Scripts, Perl in a Nutshell, Higher-Order Perl, Object Oriented Perl, Automating System Administration with Perl, and last but not least, Win32 Perl AND Perl for Dummies. Enjoy, all you Perlmongers!

Imagining radical democracy, practicing feminist anarchy

June 12, 2012 Liz

At WisCon a couple of weeks ago I was on a panel called Imagining Radical Democracy with Alexis Lothian, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Andrea Hairston. We talked about political change, culture, and science fiction, leaping into mid conversation. Everyone was quite erudite so I will try to link some of the important background concepts, books, and thinkers mentioned. The title and description of the panel don’t quite describe “what we talked about”, but everyone knew what “it” was. This was the topic:

The General Assembly has become a familiar practice since the growth of Occupy Wall Street. Anarchistic and radically democratic organizing processes have a much longer history, though, including the Zapatistas, the Spanish student movement, and movements in the history of feminism. For WisCon members, a familiar feeling might have bubbled up in watching, reading about, or participating in Occupy: wasn’t this a bit like what they did on Le Guin’s Anarres, or in DuChamp’s Free Zones? This panel will discuss the possible growth of a kind of democracy other than our current party-based political systems, using the ways it has been prefigured and imagined in feminist science fiction to help make sense of radical histories and futures.

Here is a rough transcript of the Radical Democracy panel by laceblade. It meant a lot to me personally that laceblade transcribed this panel and put it up for public reading so quickly; it’s something I started doing at WisCon panels to document the conversations for the Feminist SF Wiki, but I was too exhausted to do it this year. It was beautiful not just to see many others documenting live, but to be documented myself by someone so passionate and engaged. I was touched to the core.

I felt that we jumped immediately into the conversation with the assumption that we all knew what we were talking about without having to give much background or try to explain things. We didn’t talk about Occupy or specific movements so much as we talked about “that thing we know when we see it, or are doing it.” We didn’t even really introduce ourselves, partly out of eagerness to jump into the topics, partly from assumption people knew who we were in the context of WisCon 36, and partly because of automatically killing the rock star on the stage (opposite of killing the angel in the house!) — so I’ll write a bit of an intro now!

L. Timmel Duchamp, Timmi, is a publisher who runs Aqueduct Press; a brilliant thinker and SF author of an epic science fiction work in 5 volumes, the Marq’ssan Cycle, which is about an intervention in Earth politics by alien feminist anarchists. They convene a giant consensus meeting including two women from every Earth nation, destroy much of the technological infrastructure of the military industrial complex(es), and establish anarchist Free Zones in many locations around the planet. The book centers on the relationships and complicated conversations of various women including Kay (who is from the Professional class), Elizabeth (an Executive), and Martha (one of the proletariat… a service tech or sub-exec) and female-presenting though ambiguously gendered telepathic aliens such as Sorben and Magyyt. Revolution, imprisonment, torture, being co-opted, complicated sexual relationships across class boundaries, and the exploration of false consciousness and double consciousness all make this series politically exciting and emotionally intense. Her work in establishing a feminist science fiction press has fostered many writers and amazing, award-winning books. During the panel Timmi did what she does so well which is telling a specific story but with the feeling of it being a roundabout way to arrive at a point or an impression or knowledge conveyed which leaves layers of impressions behind — and the feeling I get from her of a mind somewhat frightening in scope and power channeled through the body of a specific fragile human being, exercising her will to focus all the dehumanization she has experienced and witnessed into a scary laser beam. I’m just saying, I feel a disturbance in The Force when she talks.

Andrea Hairston is a playwright, professor, and novelist, author of Redwood and Wildfire and Mindscape. She has done a lot of analysis in understanding the history of minstrelry in the U.S. She teaches theater and African American studies at Smith. She’s an amazing speaker and storyteller, brilliant, enthusiastic, and complicated. I love when she talks and gets excited and waves her arms around with the wildest enthusiasm and keenest intellect. And reading Mindscape, I thought (dorkiest example ever) of Menolly describing what it was like to play a piece of complicated music that other people find too difficult and technical (I believe it was The Ballad of Moreta’s Ride) to Master Shonagar; like riding a dragon!

Alexis Lothian is a writer and academic, a professor at Indiana University, and theorist of science fiction fandom. She is an active vidder and deep into media fandom, gender studies, digital cultural politics, and is a founder and editor for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. She moderated our discussion. I remember on first meeting her I came to a discussion between people of color at WisCon in someone’s hotel room, an intense and amazing conversation which she recorded with permission (I was there as assistant techie person, I think) and transcribed for the inaugural issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, recording with quiet attentiveness, contributing to the opening of that space for conversation.

I felt Laura Quilter’s absence on this panel (and at WisCon) keenly, painfully. She is a huge part of this conversation.

Timmi opened the panel by talking about how her writing and her activism (feminist and anti-globalization work) feed into each other. She talked about why science fiction is important for activism:

Bad experiences create low expectations especially with social rollbacks over the last 30 years. Creates political apathy. Political apathy is a response, not just a state of ignoring the world, it’s a state of actual response. It’s not passive even though it looks like passivity. I think what’s important about science fiction is it gives us alternatives that we can’t imagine in the US even though our history is full of tens of thousands of experiments in collective communities. All around the world, all sorts of things going on, all sorts of collective groups.

“The revolution” takes place in our imagination and is a process, not a means to an end.

Then I talked about hackerspaces and Noisebridge, the hacker/maker anarchist collective I’m part of in San Francisco. Hackerspaces are an important part of what’s happening in the current political moment. People banding together to try to form alternative social structures, pool resources, make physical spaces that reflect some of the social, cultural spaces and philosophies we have made in F/LOSS culture and on the Internet and web. As part of Riot Grrrl we tried to “Kill Rock Stars”; make and be part of a story that is not about a Great Man, not about The Hero, that works from many points of view; there is no puppet master moving us around a chessboard, and there are no saints (or sainted texts) we should canonize. Difficult SF stories, difficult narratives, are important politically to teach us all how to read reality, how to construct complicated truths. I described trying to explain “Anonymous” or “Occupy” to journalists, and how because of their failure of imagination, and their assumption that no mainstream readers could understand a story without a hero, they can’t get it. They have to participate and be changed in order to know how to tell a story that draws in the reader to participate and change.

I’m not sure how long it took me to say all that, but in my remembrance of the panel I managed it in a leaping, telegraphic, holographic staccato. I felt transported by not just my words but by knowing that we were all on the same page, many of us, and that what we were about to say would blend together like a river and take us somewhere.

Andrea said her upbringing was of a very solid African American household of being a race man, or race woman. Something which happily did not need to be explained in a feminist anti-racist science fiction con, but which I will link for you here. Andrea talked about the Iqbo Women’s War, not just the “riots” and murder by the British in a particular incident but women’s war as part of Igbo culture and politics.

. . . {the] one who tells the story rules the world. Therefore, we all need to. WE all need to be agents of action, all need to be storytellers. All need to be agents of action in the story.

For Andrea the story of Women’s War is one of working feminist anarchy, of a political process that worked, of anarchy rooted in a specific place and time and culture, that came from African women and men and worked for them; an important story. Part of that story is the British shot everyone and made the Iqbo have chiefs. Back to the idea of “no rock stars”, no leaders in the sense of elected officials who represent everyone in a hierarchical structure that feeds into the hoppers of power and that support oppressive (and in this case imperial, patriarchal) infrastructures. The book Andrea is currently writing is about a woman coming to America from that time and place.

Andrea then remembered to introduce and identify herself. So I introduced myself too and said everyone should buy my book, Unruly Islands. Andrea’s two novels are published by Aqueduct Press. My book as well, and Alexis and I both edited volumes of The WisCon Chronicles, which is a series Aqueduct publishes to document the conversations at WisCon every year. Aqueduct Press for me has solidified, made real, some of the exciting public discourse that happens at WisCon, the connections that spark our thought, the utopian ideals we share, the passion that fuels our daily practice of life and activism and writing. It made our conversations more public, and I hope adds another small brick to the things we are building, the ways we are trying desperately not to lose our histories as women, as marginalized people who are aware of the processes that shape how the stories are told and what is allowed to be seen as “real”. When I first realized what Timmi was trying to do by starting Aqueduct I was happy beyond explanation. Something that was my dream was happening in the world — for real. Cultural artifacts created and fostered, nurtured, grown. Timmi is my hero for doing this, for committing her life work to this act, for making our communities visible to each other and to others, for exposing us further as public intellectuals. I am so honored to be part of it and that they publish my work. Long ago I realized that what I wanted in life was not fame, money, success, the Good Life, in the way people sometimes describe what goals should be, but instead the respect of other people I respect. It was like a little mantra for me. Whenever it became reality in a small way, I felt bolstered and comforted: a sign I was on the right track. I rather imagined (as a teenager, in my childlike hero worship) that as an embarrassingly specific little scenario: that I’d be at a cocktail party with Marge Piercy, and she’d know my work, and we’d talk about our ideals, books, feminism, and poetics as equals in the creative process even if not equals in worldly position or age. WisCon and Aqueduct have made that dream come true for me even if I have not yet achieved the particular Nirvana of wine and cheese with Marge. I admire so many people there — very deeply. Beyond the Secret Feminist Cabal, which was a joke made real in organic “slow anarchy” fashion, and which continues to spread, which describes something that (like Riot Grrrl, like Anonymous) does not exist, and which you joined by hearing the idea and declaring you were in it, too — it came true for me. I wish that dream will come true for everyone. The respect of other people you respect.

Back to the panel. Alexis asked us all three to give specific examples of “what we were talking about” — of collectivity, of collective action and what happens and how.

In response, I talked about Noisebridge some more. (Which… ironically… is light years away from feminist utopia for me as a woman.) I talked about hackerspaces.org, the history of hackerspaces, the idea of F/LOSS culture not just “products” but culture, and cultural production, and community; the ideas of patterns and anti-patterns, in software, in architecture and culture, from the book A Pattern Language which by the way is a fascinating read and which I used to explain Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing to F/LOSS geeks. (A later WisCon panel on Feminism and F/LOSS brought this in as well.)

Alexis interrupted me to remind me that I wrote about this very topic in the latest WisCon Chronicles, Volume 6, Futures of Feminism and Fandom, which she edited. “Oh yeah! Right! Read that essay, and you will understand what I mean!” I moved on to answer Alexis’ question, explaining what Noisebridge is and how it works — and some of its glories and problems.

Alexis mentioned Louisa May Alcott and Fruitlands. I then brought in, as another strand to the pattern, Alice Marwick’s and danah boyd’s excellent paper on gender and Internet drama The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics as well as my own essay with Debbie Notkin on Internet Drama from The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 3, Carnival of Feminist SF. To understand the dynamics of women and public discourse, read that paper about teenagers’ attitudes toward “drama”.

Andrea says “drama” is melodrama. Alexis adds that it is “wank”. Yes! I then said,

By making a space in which we’re trying to address one problem, we’re more revolutionary than we realized. Once you’re part of a revolution, you have to Fix All the Things. It’s very hard, very valuable it takes place in public, documenting what happens. Also really difficult and uncomfortable

Alexis added,

What wank and drama and melodrama do and why they might just not be….part of how we negotiate. We have to emerge from it. It does things that other kinds of more carefully planned politics don’t do. Even the most trivial fights can have ripples of effects that are really important to what a community does.

And Timmi pulled it together by saying,

Little drops of water evaporate in dry atmosphere, need a human environment. Not just all of internal difficulties here but thes efforts are operating in a context in which we have vast problems. We have terrible collective problems and no collective solutions or collective process. These space (occupy, hacker, etc.) are besieged by that context. They can’t address them by themselves. That’s basically the problem. We sort of, what’s happening is more and more people are seeing the horizon of what’s possible but in this current environment, it’s very hard to …you can hack out a space but you can’t put up walls, [it’s] antithetical to what you want to do.

She then talked about being arrested for direct action against globalization, and the trial process. I got kind of excited listening to this and started writing a poem about it in my paper notebook while also live-Twittering.

A lesson from that story is that the interface between what we’re building, what we’re doing, as anarchists, feminists, activists — the interface between that and the larger world is extremely important and uncomfortable.

Alexis brought us back to talking about culture, narrative, and cultural production. Writing, drama, process, and art.

Andrea then kicked into awesome overdrive.

I love live theater, I don’t know what’s going to happen, even if you have a script. I know my blocking, audience comes in, audience makes me change. Every moment is alive. Feedback between me and the audience and other actors. Have to respond. All theater is to prepare you to be ready in the moment. That’s what anarchy is about. If you just follow blocking and your lines, that’s not going to work. What am I going to do that keeps me…the audience loves it when you solve the problem, in it for the live moment. Image of anarchy as negative melodrama. Good guys/bad guys. Victor Turner: Social drama is essential to humanity. I’m paraphrasing him. Have to have dramatic process in order to perform the meaning that you want. That’s what drama is. Struggle to have lived experience turn into meaning. That is a slow process. We’re stuck on things needing to be fast. Social drama takes time. Slow money, slow food, I think we need to have slow anarchy.

For Andrea, it is about creating ecosystems. There are people who build monuments, and people who build ecosystems. That is true in writing science fiction as well.

I spouted off at length trying to cram in more holographic imprint of what I mean and what I see and know. My process of watching many channels at once for the Arab Spring and Occupy Oakland. Learning to listen and hear decentralized narratives, which are not what you think you want to hear. Book recs: Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson (with caveats); Direct Action by David Graeber; Illicit Passages by Alice Nunn. Marq’ssan Cycle; Kevin Carson. My currently developing theory that a particular current of SF today is not post-apocalypse but is Mid-Apocalypse; not first contact with aliens, not pioneering imperialist expansion, but being inside the process; the 1% are our aliens, already here, alien because we can’t imagine or access their scale of power; this is important in what science fiction is going to become.

We had some audience responses then.

Andrea Hairston talked about capitalism and the idea of “growth”. Opposed to the ecosystem of growth, diversity.

I agree with Andrea and add that it is part of the current of science fiction I’m attempting to describe, which is about deepening interconnectedness — not about first contact or “discovering new frontiers” or invasions.

Timmi talked about journalism and false objectivity.

Andrea talked at length about lland ownership, property, the degradation of the commons which is a big part of our struggle. She brought in accessibility and specifically WisCon’s and other feminist space’s struggles to be accessible, which is part of treating the commons as the commons, as being for everyone; changing cultural attitudes toward the air and smoking, for example. I felt transported all over again to a higher level of thought hearing her bring in so many strands to our central topic — and one that touches on my experience so personally as disability and access and public space.

I put in one more book rec I had forgotten in my earlier burst of book recs that do or represent “what it is we are talking about”. Tales from the Freedom Plough, edited by 6 women, stories told by 52 different women who worked in the Civil Rights movement. Individual stories, sometimes contradicting each other, brought together to represent what happened, what is history, what is truth, and thus what is possible for us to do, like a beautiful and terrifying map. I meant to bring in Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, as another exemplar; but we were wrapping up the panel.

Timmi closed the panel wonderfully by quoting Augustine of Hippo:

Hope has two beautiful daughters, their names are Anger and Courage. Anger that things are the way they are, and Courage to make them the way they ought to be.

My latest terrible invention

June 10, 2012 Liz

Instead of explaining about all the posts I mean to write and haven’t, about WisCon and my ankles and all the books I’ve been reading, I bring you my latest terrible invention, to go with the Catula, Elboff, the Beer Hat Neti Pot, Cat Eggs, and the Sockerchief.

You know how there are Chia Pets of many varieties? Wouldn’t it be brilliant to have… the Chia Butt?

It would be a ceramic butt, with little holes all over for the seeds to sprout, creating a fascinating conversation piece you can tend and love… a green, hairy, butt.

This made my son laugh very hard and then I further sent him into the throes of laugh-trigger asthma by explaining why underwear should have pockets. I have invented… UNDERPOCKET!

Right, so back to the semi-serious blogging about something of substance that isn’t my painful bilateral achilles tendonitis with bursitis thrown in as a bonus and sciatica and bad knees. And peripheral neuralgia that no one can explain. For the last 6 months. I miss walking, driving, bike riding and my dramatic supercrip Journey Out of the Wheelchair. Now I’m very familiar with the beeping lift things that scoop you onto buses. Though I will say that I love my electric scooter and imagining the Thunderbirds Are Go launch theme as I come out of the automatically opening garage door, scooting. OMG… yes. Scooter power!

Excellent books read recently:

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

Women, friendship, social class, airplanes, Gestapo, epistolary, AWESOME. Read this immediately.

Meeks by Julia Holmes.

Dystopia! gender! social class! Kickass writing that didn’t make me want to hurl (as most “literary fiction” does) Beauty and despair.

WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi

Fabulous kids’ book about a kid in an underground survival pod with a robot named MUTHR. It has great illustrations and is very fast paced in the beginning so I suggest it as especially good for kids under 10 who get bored at exposition.

Promise of the Wolves by Dorothy Hearst

15,000 years ago, a fierce brave wolf cub watches her brother and sisters die, outcast from the Pack! OMG! Wolf Ayla! The Greatwolves are up to something and the 2 leggers or whatever they were called are sort of the companion animal they long to soul bond with (but it is FORBIDDEN.) I got this for Danny’s daughter as it looked like a better and more sophisticated Warriors style book about fierce animals, with mythology and hunting, then I started reading it and couldn’t stop till I was done.

Into the Wise Dark by Neesha Meminger

Surly psychic teenage girls! No vampires! Indian-American family complexities, mums who Mean Well, and creepy therapists who totally don’t! Female friendship and working together with MAGIC… time travel… Goddess stuff… a hot boyfriend back in time, tending the goats of the village… Very enjoyable. There was a scene it it where she was in these bubble things in space in isolated space prison cells and I could SWEAR I have read something else that was like that a long time ago. What was it? Anyway, this was great and I loved how it sneaked some space and future into what is usually focused around “paranormal” and history. Keep sticking those silver jumpsuits in there Neesha!! Yeah!

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente.

Sex, desire, creativity, aesthetics, ummm fantasy? way out there! To get into this amazing ultimate Virconium city or Amber or Utopian weirdness world you have to have sex with someone who also has a piece of the map tattooed on them. This book has a lot of scenes of people having uncomfortably casual sex and freaking out about it. I am only halfway through and at first wasn’t sure what the hell was going on and if I was like, too far into Cat Valente’s Id Vortex to feel comfy and then I got really into it and felt the lid was off and let’s just go with the flow.

Habitation of the Blessed duology also by Cat Valente

Extremely good! Bears thinking about! Easy to read and lovely and packed with history and beauty and I especially love the bits that are the butterfly’s and the blemmye’s stories. I can’t remember their names and lent the books out already. If you bounced off the massively deep layers of nested stories (or the purpley prose) of Orphan’s Tales give this a try – its structure is more accessible. I really get blown away by how good and great and geniusy Valente’s books are. Bite on that Gene Wolfe. Stuff it Orhan Pamuk. These are the massive storytelling epics I’ve been waiting for and without the cognitive dissonanance of having to work around all the fucking heinous unnecessary sexism that I have to cope with while reading Wolfe and Pamuk.

Report to the Men’s Club – Carol Emschwiller.

Short stories which left me with the impression of first contact hermity mountain women of the 19th century; if you liked Souls by Joanna Russ you’ll like this… the little known first contact nun genre!

Redemption in Indigo – Karen Lord.
A great speculative novel set in west africa. Magic and gods and chaos – I want a Chaos Stick! I loved this book and will look for her next one. This story made me think a bunch about scoping out the parameters of woman centered hero tales.

Unruly Islands will blow your mind, so buy it

April 27, 2012 Liz

If you don’t really like poetry because it usually sucks and is embarrassing, buy my latest book of poems, Unruly Islands. Buy some extra copies for your friends and one for your giant robot. It goes well in hackerspaces! Poems about the moon landing, modem noises, the dotcom crash, seasteading, surly teenage embezzlers, San Francisco alternate future geographies, and the history of utopianism from the Whole Earth Catalog through Riot Grrrl to Burning Man.

Also fits perfectly into your #Occupy library tent! Or — donate one to your local library for mega subversive pleasure!

Buy Unruly Islands from Aqueduct Press directly if you like supporting small, incredibly intellectual feminist science fiction publishers. Or buy Unruly Islands Amazon.com. it’s $12.00 and 96 pages of a weird trip through my brain.

The book has a gorgeous cover by an artist and hacker I met at Noisebridge, Meredith Scheff aka ladycartoonist.

Here’s the book description and fabulous blurbs.

Unruly Islands collects 36 poems suffused with science fiction, revolution, and digital life on the edge.

Annalee Newitz, editor of i09, says of the collection: ”Liz Henry’s poetry is always moving, funny, and weird, regardless of whether she’s flying us on a rocketship through a science-fictional social revolution or telling us a wry story about being an adolescent embezzler. This collection is like a monster cyborg mashup of Walt Whitman, Joanna Russ, and the internet. Which is to say: Fuck yeah!”

Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive, Why Things Burn, and Final Girl, writes: ”With all the awe and shiny of Barbarella, the breathless curiosity of Robert Hayden’s American Journal, and the dismal, too-real fluorescent sheen of the corner store, Liz Henry takes the world (and the otherword) and makes it ours in all of its signal and noise, its glorious classwar and cussmouth. She takes the unknowable along with the familiar and shows us how, incontrovertibly, the future is here, and the future is us.”

And Maureen Owen, author of Imaginary Income and Zombie Notes, observes, ”Liz Henry’s protean, phantasmagorical images slingshot us out and boomerang us back simultaneously over multiple plains in all directions. Immediate, futuristic, subliminal. An intimate, wild ride through a surrealistic mind field.”

I’ll be reading this month in San Francisco at Writers With Drinks on May 12, Red Hill Books in Bernal Heights May 18, and at the feminist science fiction convention in Madiscon, Wisconsin, WisCon later in May.

Voyage to the End of the Block

February 8, 2012 Liz

Today I read Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), read a lot on Wikipedia and elsewhere about the Ainu and their history, and got about halfway through Finding Fernanda which I read about on Racialicious. It’s awesome investigative journalism, a good expose of the politics of international adoption and child trafficking.

In the morning I tried out the scooter. The battery heated up while charging to scary-hot and didn’t charge fully. I took the scooter for a spin anyway.

At the end of the block I came back up the hill feeling very doubtful that the battery was going to behave itself. Sadly I was correct as the scooter didn’t have the power to get me up the slope of a driveway that cut across the sidewalk much less the rest of the way up hill. I texted a couple of people and then realized there was still a charge but the steepness of the hill lowered the battery gauge to 0. So I serpentined my way up. About 4 houses away (at the steepest bit of the hill) Danny came out to rescue me and started laughing. “Are you TACKING?”

So I will try a new battery tomorrow. I called 6 wheelchair and medical supply stores and they didn’t stock this kind of battery. They all special order it and it takes 3 or 4 weeks. Weeks!!! Then I called someplace called Battery Plus, which had it and for much cheaper than the wheelchair stores. I hope it works. I’m counting on it to get around! But if it doesn’t I’ll find a more powerful powerchair.

After a rest and icing my ankles I tried going down the hill in my manual chair. It wasn’t too hard with gloves on to help me brake. So, that’s fabulous! That means I can get on the #24 bus. I hopped on and was on my way to physical therapy in the Castro.

On the bus I watched a very very old lady with a quad cane and a funny hat getting on the bus using the lift and walking with extreme difficulty. Obviously a regular. There was some fuss and rearranging as the driver made some people get up for her. Another very old lady said hello to her very happily. I eavesdropped on their conversation about shopping and then the lady with the cane said, “Now that I can go out of the house again I only go as far as 18th because I’m just afraid of getting tangle up with that Occupy stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with them 100% but I’m scared I’ll get caught in one of those crowds.” They agreed about liking Occupy but being scared. That was so sad….

Then it was my stop. I realized I had backed my chair into the claw thing that grabs and locks your chair down to the floor. I usually try to avoid those and just hang on tight. The lever was stuck and would not release my chair. This snowballed embarrassingly until 2 people plus the driver plus some sort of transit cop were trying to tug my chair free and not listening to my protests that they were going to pop the tire right off the rim. Finally I stood up (mostly because people’s armpits and crotches were in my face, very annoying, and i was being jostled way too much) There was a collective gasp from half the bus. SHE CAN WALK!!!!! The driver turned around and went “Girl, what are you doing standing up! Sit back down!” “Look… that’s what the boots are for, standing up!” The chair was freed, I thanked them all and then got out of there as fast as possible feeling angry and embarrassed.

Then it was very lovely to be in the parklet in the sun at Market and Castro. I had a cookie and wrote in my notebook and looked at people. I wonder if people still say “basket days” about days like this when it’s amazingly warm and everyone’s in tight shorts? NOT EVERYONE THOUGH since there was a completely naked dude wandering around all leathery and hippietastic, holding a sort of wizard staff walking stick. Okay then!

Physical therapy was reassuringly fine and was half massage, my favorite kind, not like the boot camp kind of PT. I took a taxi home. End of story! At least I mentioned books a little in the beginning of the post.

Here is how I watch livestreams and twitter events as they are happening, btw:

And in other news, this article ticked me off because of the framing: Activists and Anarchists Speak For Themselves at Occupy Oakland. The title says it. It is activists and anarchists speaking for themselves. Yet claiming to be speaking for “voiceless” people in an “empty” city and a battlezone, a riot, a war zone. I am deeply suspicious of framing events and places and histories in this way. It in fact goes with occupying to describe a place as empty and its (non)inhabitants as voiceless (a clear Denial of Agency attack) and thus making that place suitable for a battleground. This audio clip from an activist named Soul is more like it. Work with the people doing effective work rather than writing stuff about how great it is to have a battle with riot cops.

Tourist in the library

October 28, 2011 Liz

I am on vacation in England visiting Oblomovka’s relatives and have about 100 blog posts to write, about books I’m reading, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and my trip, and some things about music that have been building up & that I need to write about. And I owe an update on my book coming out this winter from Aqueduct Press. But until that happens… here’s today’s burbling!

Today we drove to Oxford (from Essex) and I was super happy it was sunny & everything was gorgeous. I enjoy driving on the other side of the road as it feels like a superpower to concentrate and master it — just a tiny bit scary.

We went to look at the exhibits at the Bodleian Library. A page of Frankenstein! Hooke’s Micrographia! Sappho! Kalila and Dimna!!!! Suffragette flyers! The Whetstone of Witte, Book of Fixed Stars, amazingly beautiful Urashima scroll, Marco Polo, Kalidasa, Chinese poems in jade book covers, Gutenberg Bible, Wilfred Owen poem which I enjoyed b/c I just read 2 of the Pat Barker trilogy about WWI poets & conscientious objectors …. Well, I beamed happily over too many things to list and had a fantastic time. When I come back someday I’ll find something here that relates to my research and dig into their reading room!

Description of a flea: “But, as for the beauty of it, the Microscope manifests it to be all over adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suit of sable Armour, neatly jointed, and beset with multitudes of sharp pinns, shap’d almost like Porcupine’s Quills, or bright conical Steel-bodkins; the head is on either side beautify’d with a quick and round black eye….”

I thought as I looked at all the books and scrolls and fragments — this is what I love to do and what I’ll always do — even if I weren’t from this time I would have done something like this as best I could. I thought of all the people spending their lives doing this strange, esoteric, beautiful thing and felt like I loved them and I’m so glad for them that they got to make books and write whatever they wrote and that other people still appreciate it. A bit sentimental & simple really. And feeling like I could a message sent back through time to say “Hi Mary! I love how you made the moonlight shine in the monster’s hair as he convulsed! You’re awesome!” simply because her handwriting is real & right in front of me. Though I can’t quite approve on another level of the mystical fetishization of objects. Still, I’m swayed…

We then walked around High Street, Queen’s Lane, Broad St. and back up. I thought about how nice it would be to live right next to a little library/study hall and barely have to go anywhere and just write all the time. Hell yeah!!!!! Bought a notebook and pen & had cream tea.

Then I was going to go to a women-only Take Back the Night march and rally but realized I was far too tired and it was uphill both ways with cobblestones. Thought about maybe Taking Back the Taxi to the rally at the end of the march, and then wussed out. I am sorry, nice feminists of Oxford, that I missed meeting you and supporting your rally… Instead it is time for #occupymybathtub.

The Eye in the Door

October 16, 2011 Liz

I’m reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, which is elliptical, perturbing, and depressing but very good. It’s about WWI, the trauma suffered by soldiers, conscientious objectors, and the people around them. It’s deeply anti-war.

I liked this bit from Eye in the Door, the second book. Prior, a former soldier with severe shell shock and asthma, is thinking about his boss Major Lode’s mindset.

Lode had no idea. He’d spent his entire adult life–boyhood too, for that matter–in uniformed, disciplined, hierarchical institutions, and he simply couldn’t conceive of the possibility that other people might function differently. It was all a great big chess board to him. This rag-bag collection of Quakers, socialists, anarchists, suffragettes, syndicalists, Seventh Day Adventists and God know who else was merely an elaborate disguise, behind which lurked the real anti-war movement, a secret disciplined highly efficient organization dedicated to the overthrow of the state as surely as Lode was dedicated to its preservation. And on the other side of the board, as head of the opposing army, elusive, tenacious, dangerous: The Black King himself…

Very apt in thinking about the state mentality about the OccupyWallStreet and #OccupyEverything protests. There isn’t a King. That’s the whole point.

I’m still trying to untangle the fiction from the reality as I read articles about Maud Allan and the infamous Cult of the Clitoris article and the “Black Book” that supposedly held the names of over 40,000 lesbian, gay, or bi people in Britain who were being blackmailed by Germany into betraying state secrets. Okay! Totally weird! Truth stranger than fiction, as usual. If we don’t have the supposed Berlin Black Book I’m surprised someone didn’t write a fake one!

But on a more serious note the books made me think of Bradley Manning and his ongoing ordeals in prison. His “eye in the door” is the same eye from 1917. I also often wonder about sexuality, gender identification, and anti-war resistance (result of consciousness raising/epistemological inquiry). Though there isn’t a King, there may be a rhizome. Consider that we also present a greater attack surface because of our intersectionalities, so that our strength is also our weakness. Apparently Pat Barker’s ellipticalness is infectious!

Kandila – bilingual poetry book

September 23, 2011 Liz

My friend ephemere is taking pre-orders for a calligraphy poembook. Here’s her description of the project:

Kandila will be a little book rendered completely, from the title page to the very last leaf, in calligraphy. It will feature three of my (rather long!) bilingual love poems to my country, the Philippines, rendered in different calligraphic styles, as well as a few pages of baybayin calligraphy and “playing around with letters” calligraphy art. I estimate the approximate length at fifty to sixty calligraphed pages. Each book will be signed.

A .pdf of the entire book will be available for free online. Please note that there will be parts of this book rendered in Filipino, but the translation will not be calligraphed; instead it will be available as a printed sheet accompanying the book, and will also be freely viewable online.

Kandila will be sent out by mid-November. All funds raised will go toward supporting me in the wake of my being terminated from my job, which I lost due to my unwillingness to remain silent about my marginalized identity and beliefs.Details here.

ink and pen drawing of a woman in a lace head scarf
Please support her, buy the book, order her beautiful art, and pass this on if you can!

News from Burn This Press

April 7, 2011 Liz

Some of you may already have a copy of my first printing of Daylighting, a long poem in a tiny book, published under the Burn This Press imprint in January. I mailed out about 80 of them, gave away more, and now have done another batch. They are small square books covered in cardstock, with nothing fancy but the linen-textured paper.

It was exciting to change the name of my press and re-think how to do things. The new books will be poetry, translations, and perhaps some rants, manifestos, or whatever feminist or political/cultural/technical polemics come my way.

Plus, what could be more inspiring than Yet Another OMFG WordPress Install?! Also, I made stickers extremely cheaply from an online address label service !

I tried to make the switch from pasteup to printout, and might go a bit further with that process now that I have Cheap Impostor, which is shareware that does imposition. You know that thing where you do a zine, and you have to make a mockup to plan out what pages go where in your xeroxable originals so that you can fold the zine correctly, and the double sided copies match up? I never knew that was called “imposition”, but it is, and if you search on that, you can find awesome software that takes a PDF and makes your zine or book with signatures of however many pages you like.

“Daylighting” is a poem about the imaginary and real, historical, past, and future of one of San Francisco’s buried streams, Islais Creek. It will turn you inside out! I’ve read it in public a couple of times now. How happy it made me! People laughed with pure outrage and disbelief!

My book for March is Bad skin, my translation of Carmen Berenguer’s “Mala piel“. The book is still tiny, but includes the original poem in Spanish, my translation on facing pages, and some notes on the translation as well as the history of Chilean indigenous ocean-going people and on ecriture feminine. I also added in some illustrations taken from historical texts about the Alcalufe people and their boats. The poem has interesting political dimensions but what you will notice about it first is that it’s a cataloguing poem, one of those poems that describes all the parts of a woman’s body. Rather than driveling on about someone’s alabaster brow and eyes like stars, Mala piel gets realy, really into the skin; pores, spots, hairiness, texture, crinkliness, tightness, stretchmarks, wrinkles, well, everything. It’s incredibly down and dirty. It may have actually made me blush more than once. I also felt a deep sense of happiness at it, as I thought of my own Bad Skin and all it means. How about yours?

It was an extremely difficult poem to translate, and I’m sure the translation has heinous errors of judgement and misunderstandings. I tried to convey various layers of meaning, neologisms, changed words, and general feminist awesomeness as well as the deep meanings I felt were there. Many are missing! Corrections, illuminations, explanations, and arguments are welcome, as always.

Carmen was very patient with my questions. Take a look at her Facebook fan page and give her a thumbs up.

I’m going to do the next book for April soon, and lay it out for final printing in Cheap Impostor.

After that I plan on printing up my epic poem about the utopian technohippies of California, “Whole Earth Catalog”, and then “Companion to the Doctor” which is about women in science fiction television shows. I say that recklessly, as neither of those are finished. No pressure!

Then translations of either two to three short poems also by Carmen Berenguer, or “Carta de viaje” by Elvira Hernandez, or something else to be determined. My hope is for smallness and density, tiny portable books, not great lumps of intimidating virtue, but mindblowing awesomeness – like carrying a speck of antimatter around with you in your pocket. Poetry is quite pointless these days in the U.S.. It’s so smug. Or it’s song lyrics, which are great, but… Maybe you need a little mind-bending dose, a reminder that language is a weird powerful beast with political power. Oh, language! And I don’t mean L=A-N=G either, I mean the sort of thing you wrap your tongue around. Carry a poem with you to look at!

If you want to be on my mailing list for tiny books for Burn This Press, let me know in email: lizhenry@gmail.com.

Hovering around the edges of SXSW

March 14, 2011 Liz

Hello from Texas! I’m enjoying every second of driving around and talking and seeing things, post oaks, creeks, weird little sheds, retaining walls with junk and painted tiles cemented into them, I love south 1st and brightly painted mexican restaurants, I bought a bag of pastries to nosh on in our room, people were all walking around from party to party and show to show, Super Ranchito stores and odd warehouses that had blinky lights and something *going on*, an entire marching band dressed like bees, a girl in the back of a pedicab playing a tuba, infinite hipster nerds casually slopping back and forth from party to party down east 5th, just some general funkiness, grackles swooping and screeching all over the trees, all the orangey brick or limestone of the buildings, and the way there are lone stars or texas shapes on damn near everything!

Friday night I went out with Kris, who lived at 21st St. Co-op when I was first there in 1987 or so. She picked me up and took me to Bedpost Confessions, a fiction reading and sex-positive scene, with over a hundred people sitting there listening to the stories.

As we drove around I felt sad as the supersonic space simulator zoinking thing is no longer between Taos Co-op and Ken’s Donuts. It was a big metal i-beam. If you bonked it specially, it made the loveliest space noise. Alas, it’s gone!

The cab driver who took me to the car rental place told me about a time when he had cancer and had to panhandle on corners to raise $3000 to get cancer treatment at MD Anderson in Houston. He pointed out a location on Airport Blvd where he had bad luck. He ended up raising the money standing outside a Mexican grocery store on South 1st. In less than a month he’d raised the money. The cancer treatment saved him from having his arm amputated. He told a good story as we circled around through the neighborhood near the highway and 51st street. I wanted to tell him to tell that story to everyone, since it made me want to tip him high.

There was a 7 foot tall, very large dude in the car rental, getting a big old panel truck. I admired his amazing belt which was covered in big texas-shaped conchos with stars on them and looked well loved and cared for. He looked sheepish for a bit, hemming and hawing about “where he got the belt”. He put the conchos on himself with his tools, and 30 years ago, it was his horse’s saddle cinch. Wow, what a belt. I then felt AMAZINGLY happy driving off in the rental car. The powerrrrr!

It’s beautiful to have a car. Right now, I can walk a couple of blocks, but it hurts and is very exhausting. I can’t walk a couple of blocks, do something, and then walk back! While my wheelchair is great, the curb cuts are terrible in downtown Austin. Really terrible. The sidewalks are often made of bricks, interrupted by stairs and tree planters. The crowns of the roads – the bit where the road rises up in the center – are high, which means I have to go uphill twice every time I cross a street; once to get into the center of the roat, and a second time to get up the curb cut on the far side after I’ve gone downhill into the gutter. If not for the car I would feel a bit trapped here in the hotel. The downtown pedicabs seem like a great alternate option; I took one last night back to the hotel from Colorado and 4th with Danny holding my wheelchair in his lap. For a minute the pedicab cycler thought I meant to sit in the wheelchair and hang on behind his cab trailer. The look on his face was priceless.

On Friday I drove off the long way over the bridge that is east of I-35, on Pleasant Valley, to Skye’s house where we gossiped and worked super hard. It was really good to talk about all the things (work projects) where it’s so much easier to show each other directly and fix things right on the spot. It was productive!

We went to lunch aiming for El Mesón. It was closed at 2:30 though! So we ended up on South 1st. I had ceviche and bought some bags of pastries. Then… well, one of my totally stupid goals for this trip was to go to a store that has good Yelp reviews called New BROhemia which has vintage men’s shirts and especially guayaberas. I got a fabulous cream colored guayabera and another mexican shirt (not a guayabera but with a flower/vine pattern) that’s my dream shirt for being foppishly butch. You would have to see its delicate pattern of rosebuds. I couldn’t stop saying and thinking “New BROhemia” and then busting up laughing.

Danny and Tempest and I hung out for a while in the HIlton bar. We gossiped about writing and journalism and activism and Wikimedia Foundation and mobile phones and netbooks and politics and online things for hours. Just as Tempest hopped into a cab and we were leaving we saw Annalee and Charlie who were dragging us back to the bar for one more drink. But I had already decided to go take a bath and fall asleep. I didn’t put any talks this year but spoke at SXSWi in 2006, 2007, and 2009. I’m just along for the ride.

Yesterday I took it easy in the morning, then went with Tempest and Virginia to lunch in East Austin. Danny and I went to Pease Park for fossils, then to my old co-op to look around. I lived there for 5 years and love it dearly. Three people took us around on a tour, unlocking doors, explaining the current culture of the co-op and the subcultures of its different sub-buildings. There had been a party last night, so the common areas were trashed and smelled like beer. The kitchen and dining room were clean so I think it was just the aftermath of the party making things look a bit heinous! The computer room has been expanded into where the laundry used to be. The kitchen and pantries are re-organized, but startlingly the same even down to some of the same laminated signs from 20 years ago still up on the walls. I recall our kitchen manager from around 1988, Lillian, making the yellow laminated “Save Plates” sign that’s still up on the door of the kitchen. It’s very interesting to see how institutions and traditions evolve, what lasts and what changes.

One thing that was exactly the same about 21st St. Co-op; people gave me a tour in exactly the lovely way that we used to give tours to people 25 years ago. Happy to explain anything or unlock any door, with a sort of touching concern that you get the answers to your questions and the experience of the place that you wanted to get. There is also an openness about the place’s flaws and drawbacks. The guy who gave me a tour, whose name I forgot, and Marisa who very nicely took us to see the Rainbow Road mural in suite 1B, both invited us back to hang out and have a beer that evening, just stick around and hang out, or come back during the week for dinner. I notice the same culture of welcoming new people at Noisebridge, as strangers walk in, are shown around, and are invited to stay.

Last night after a rest in the afternoon I went to the Gawker/Gizmodo party. I stayed put in one place and talked with people up there on the outside patio of the Hangar Lounge. There was an elevator, hooray! People brought me lots of drinks with glowing ice cubes. I talked with Rebecca and some other people from the ACLU, with Eva and Julie from the EFF, with Annalee and Charlie, Gina Trapani, Turi from Demotix, Latoya from Racialicious, and tons of other people. I explained what BlogHer is a bunch of times, as usual at tech conferences; people still have the impression it’s a small non-profit!

Today I went to see HONK, which was like the best bits of a parade happening over and over. Over a dozen marching bands went down Cesar Chávez street. We ran into Adina and Sunir and Prentiss and David. The parade ended up at Pan American park, where the bands played one by one on stage. In between sets, people stood up from the lawn and started jamming spontaneously. Adina and I talked about wikis and wikimedia issues including ways citation and sourcing could be changed to work in a less elitist way.

Honk was so inspiring! While I wish I had an accordion or trombone or a trumpet and could play them, maybe a harmonica would be more realistic . . . very portable… lightweight . . . I could join a marching band playing the harmonica. Now I want Noisebridge to have its own half-human, half-robot marching band!

After the Honk parade we had lunch on South Congress, rested and worked a while at the hotel, and then I went back over to Travis Heights to my friend Marian’s house, looked at her books and talked with her and Reed and ate her delicious food. I know Marian from the ALTA literary translators’ conference. I gave her some tiny books from my small press (Burn This Press) including my translation of Mala piel. She gave me lots of book recs and copies of two of her translations – one of Oblomov (!) and the other, White on Black, a memoir by Ruben Gallego, a guy with cerebral palsy who grew up in Soviet state institutions.

After that, the Google/ACLU party where I met lots of great people. It was an 80s themed party. Just beforehand I had the idea to shave Cyndi Lauper checkerboard pattern in the side of my head with Danny’s beard trimmer. (It is easy enough to shave all of it off later.) Ran into Kaliya, Phoebe and some other Wikimedia people. We left pretty soon though. It was way too loud in there, and I couldn’t get upstairs. I felt like my ears were damaged for a couple of hours afterwards! Really loud!

We kept running into people in the street – Tassos, Schuyler, the new media people from London who used to be riot grrrls (and I’m sure still are) and the people from ITP/Singly, and Tara Hunt. We stopped by the League of Extraordinary Hackers event, which had gone past the hacking part and gotten to the part with screaming crowds surrounding an arena with lego robots, and as that was also too loud and crowded we lounged in the tail end of a steampunk room and then came home in an “uber pedicab”. I don’t know how anyone has the energy to go to the entire conference and go out afterwards and keep it up for the entire time of the film and music festival too! Or how anyone runs this huge sprawling complex of conferences!